Saturday, February 19, 2011

Diego Borja: Chevron's Missing Dirty Trickster

The empty newsracks around San Francisco City Hall were blanketed with "MISSING" flyers earlier this week. Diego Borja is an Ecuadorian who was caught on tape bragging to a friend about his "dirty tricks" activities on behalf of the Chevron Corporation, which is being sued by a coalition of peasants in Ecuador. Diego claims to have gotten a judge kicked off the case with a trumped-up bribery attempt, along with delivering false soil samples from a quartet of shell companies he set up for the oil giant. Chevron brought Borja and his wife to the Bay Area last year, housing them in a $6,000 a month rental in San Ramon, before he suddenly disappeared after a subpoena request in Northern California. (Click here for a post last year by Joe Eskenazi at SF Weekly about the curiousness.)

The lawsuit is about Amazonian river valleys that have been poisoned by Texaco, which is now owned by Chevron. The legal case in Ecuador has been ongoing for close to two decades, and a verdict was finally announced this week against Chevron, with a $9 billion fine. The corporation is appealing, of course, and continuing with a high-powered public relations campaign that poses them as victims of an extortion shakedown. The Anschutz-owned Examiner chain just published a three-part series by some flack this week making exactly those claims.